


If I Could Have Been There

by JeanjacketCarf



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: AU- AU, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Earth-2 AU, Episode: s08e01 Starling City, Gen, Half-Siblings, Oliver Queen Has PTSD, Oliver Queen is Not The Green Arrow, Thea Queen Lives, canon-typical forgiveness for horrible crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22392934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanjacketCarf/pseuds/JeanjacketCarf
Summary: For ten years, Oliver Queen dreamed of returning home to Starling City. As he watched the Queen's Gambit sink into the north China sea with his father on-board, he swore to himself that he would be a better man and make his father proud. After years in hell which turned him first into a survivor, then a killer, then a shell of his former self, he came to believe he would never be able to make good on that promise. Until one day he is found and he gets to come home.Only everything is wrong. Thea is dead and Tommy is planning to destroy the Glades because of it, all while the mysterious Hood stalks the wealthy and corrupt of the city.Or Oliver comes home and everything's terrible. What's a guy with a particular set of skills and no dogmatic mission to do?
Relationships: Tommy Merlyn & Oliver Queen, Tommy Merlyn & Oliver Queen & Thea Queen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The idea is that this would be an introduction to an AU and then I might go on to write more one shots in this universe, centering on the three siblings.

He hardly thinks it’s real. The boat appearing out of the mist. Not Ivo’s hellship, a simple fishing rig investigating new waters. He lights the bonfire on the beach by arrow from his lookout post, the rough outcropping of rock he’s sat on for hours every day for what must be years, endless years. He prays that the fire will catch, that they will see it, that they will come find him. Still, another part of him thinks it is only another vivid dream.

When they find him, beard and hair long and scraggly, body thin and malnourished, covered in scar tissue, he clings to them desperately. He blubbers on in a language they can barely understand but it doesn’t seem like he’s saying anything particularly coherent. The fishermen take him back to Dalian and call the police who call the American consulate. No one knows who the man is but the junior diplomats at the embassy take his fingerprints and send them to the FBI.

The news reports a white man found on a deserted island who may have been there for years. The FBI comes back with no hits on the fingerprints which isn’t too much of a surprise. The ambassador puts him up in the apartment he usually keeps for his mistress and calls in a British psychologist to try to get the man to speak. They leave him alone for the night.

Oliver wants to sleep by the window where he can see the stars but the sky is orange with light pollution and the city is too loud. He can barely think. He cups his hands over his ears and rocks back and forth on the floor. The bed is too soft, it feels like it will swallow him whole when he lays on it. Finally, he chooses the tiled floor of the bathroom with the fan on to drown out the sounds. He curls up on the floor and shivers through his nightmares.

As he does every night he counts the people he knows are still alive on his fingers. His mother. Thea. Tommy. Laurel. People he knows must still be alive because if they weren’t, he would feel it like another scar on his body. Like the hole in his chest that appeared when his father died. Like the scars on his back that remind him that Sara died because of him.

He remembers that moment later, his conviction that they were all alive and well, when Malcolm Merlyn and his mother both look at him with sympathetic, sad eyes. When Tommy grips his face and says, “If you were here you would have protected our sister.”

It hits home like a blow to his gut. Their sister, the one they share. Because of course, he should have known that Thea’s father is Malcolm Merlyn. That he and Tommy have always been tied together. That he’s let down everyone he ever cared about.

“Tommy, I’m sorry.” The words grind their way out of him just like they have for the last month. His voice a foreign thing to him.

Tommy steps back and looks away. His shoulders are shaking with anger. He moves like a wounded man. No matter how long he’s been planning this, this plan of his is an act of passion. Completely irrational.

Or at least, Oliver wants to believe that. He may be a murderer but he doesn’t want his brother to be one too.

“Tommy!” He yells when his brother leaves him hanging in the warehouse, feet just skimming over the damp floor. “Don’t do this! Please! Think about what Thea would want!”

Tommy pauses at the door and looks over his shoulder at him.

“You know there’s something Thea used to say. The dead…”

Oliver knows where he’s going. “Don’t want anything.”

Tommy nods. “It’s the benefits of being dead. I’ll see you later, Ollie. After it’s done.”

The door bangs shut, echoing in the hollow space. Oliver is alone again and more empty than he’s ever been.

....

The British psychologist is an older blonde woman. She looks almost nothing like his mother and yet that’s all he can think about when he sees her. She slips into the apartment flanked by two plainclothes soldiers and finds him shirtless and shoe less, his hair sloppily buzz cut, the beard untamed, digging through the bedroom closet. Lingerie is littered on the floor and on the bed and he looks at each piece like he’s never seen anything like it in his life.

She clears her throat. “Perhaps we can talk in the kitchen.”

He mutely follows her into the room but refuses to sit down. She chooses one of the stools surrounding the kitchen island and waves the soldiers off. They retreat back to the front door. They’ve finally picked up that he’s dangerous. It only took him nearly breaking one of the medical staff’s arms when they tried to shave his beard.

She fiddles with the latch on her briefcase and he watches her. That hair. It had been five years since he had seen anything like it. Five years since he had been in the company of other people. Ten, maybe, since Moira Queen had seen him off on the docks in Starling City.

“The fishermen who found you said you talked. They didn’t know what you said since they don’t speak English but they recognized it. They pegged you for an American because you sounded like Captain America apparently. But now apparently you don’t talk. Why is that?” She tilts her head and stares into his eyes until he has to look away. She’s going for sympathetic but he can see the angle of the predator in her shoulders. She is here to pry information out of him.

A part of him wants to keep quiet. To use all he learned about holding up under torture and resist but the temptation is too strong. If he tells these people what they want, he’ll be able to go home.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Queen. My name is Oliver Queen.”

....

Moira meets him at the hospital in Starling City after the doctors have looked him over. Again. So far civilization has been endless examinations, poking and prodding. They ask about his scars and he cannot tell them. There’s the shark bite, the wound on his thigh from a charging wild boar, the nicks and scraps on his hands and up his arms and legs. All these are explainable, a result of island life, of living at the edge of starvation in a monstrous place. The others- the burns, the marks from whips and guns and knives and arrows- the ones that come from other people are harder to explain. He was alone on the island. They will never find the discreet graves in a secluded glen or the jumble of other bones which litter the place. 

Oliver cannot bear to tell the doctors or his mother what happened to him. So he keeps silent. 

He turns to meet Moira, his mother, for the first time as a man. He has more meat on his bones than in years, he’s survived the ecstasy and agony of a hot shower, his hair and beard are clipped however poorly, he’s dressed in a clean shirt and pants but clearly what she sees horrifies her. He tries to smile but it feels like baring his teeth. 

Intimacy is difficult. He feels like a junkyard dog, he needed to be lured closer and closer with bait but even as he wants it he creeps with his tail between his legs, snarling. His mother hugs him and he flinches. Tommy clamps his hand on his shoulder and he has to resist throwing him to the ground. It was easier with Shado and Slade. They were killers too and knew how to give space. Of course, he had been younger then too, he hadn’t spent as much time alone, he hadn’t been hurt so thoroughly. 

Then they tell him that Thea is dead.

....

At the party, the one that is supposedly in Oliver’s honor, despite how he hates the crowd and noise, Tommy is drunk and hollow eyed.

“You just missed her, Ollie. If- If you had come back a year ago you could have seen her. She probably wouldn’t have done it if you were there. It was losing you and Robert that crushed her. She never got over it, never. And I was a terrible influence.”

“Are you,” Oliver struggles with something caught in his throat. He can’t seem to speak loud enough to be heard over the music. “Are you saying she killed herself?”  
Tommy shakes his head and slams his beer down hard on the low table in front of him. Underneath his handsome face is a anger dark and ugly. “Isn’t doing that shit already like killing yourself! Look at the news, all those celebrity overdoses, do you think those are accidents? No, this fucked up city got that shit in her veins and she never saw anything that made her want to stay.”

“I’m sorry,” Oliver says unsure what he’s apologizing for. For what Tommy went through. For not being there. For not saving Thea like he wishes he could have.

Tommy pulls himself together with a inhaled breath, spine snapping straight. 

“Yeah, well just saying sorry doesn’t cut it. Someone has to do something.” He stands, buttoning his blazer. “If you’ll excuse me I have some business to attend to.”

Oliver watches him glide across the dance floor stopping to talk to people Oliver only vaguely remembers, smiling, shaking hands, and then slip into a back hallway of the club. Oliver recognizes the stride, the purpose behind it, and for that reason he follows. 

Oliver walks as if he was stalking prey, keeping to the walls. He is silent. He reaches the end of the hallway and presses his ear against the locked door. There are voices on the other side. 

“How did you get this?” Tommy asks. 

“After the hood attacked, the lab was trashed and the police were everywhere,” another man with a nervous voice replies. “Your father wanted me to hide the dwarf star particles because they’re proprietary. I thought they might be just what you were looking for. He’ll never know they’re missing, not until it’s too late.”

“And what I’m reading was right? With enough pressure-”

“They’ll implode. Yes. Spectacular effect but fairly contained.”

Tommy laughs sounding almost giddy. “Just enough to excise the cancer from this city.”

A chill runs down Oliver’s spine. The Glades. Where Thea died, Tommy wants to destroy it.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, hoss,” a voice says behind Oliver. Rene, Tommy’s personal bodyguard smirks at him.

“Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s going to kill people!” Oliver whispers. He backs up giving himself enough room to attack if he needs to.

Rene shrugs. “See, I don’t really care. As long as the pays good enough.” 

He goes for his gun and Oliver kicks out, knocking it from his hand, immediately going for a cross to the face. 

Rene moves out of the way just enough for the punch to graze his cheek, grabbing Oliver’s arm to pull him off balance.

Oliver goes with the momentum, punching him in the sternum and using his superior height to wrap him in a chokehold.

Rene elbows him in gut and stomps on his foot but Oliver holds on stubbornly. 

The door opens behind him and he is momentarily distracted, just long enough for Rene to reel forward his head and smash Oliver in the nose with the back of his head. 

Oliver staggers back, dazed, right onto the prongs of a taser. The arc of electricity through his muscles is painfully familiar but it doesn’t prevent him from seizing and collapsing to the floor. Tommy stands over him, looking grim.

“You should have stayed out of it, Ollie.”

Before Oliver can say anything, Rene brings a boot smashing down on his face.

....

Oliver comes to, hanging by chains from the ceiling of a warehouse. Tommy prowls about in front of him like a caged tiger and explains his plan like the kind of Bond villain who keeps a caged tiger. He thanks the Hood, the masked vigilante assaulting Starling City’s wealthy and corrupt for causing just enough chaos for his plan to come to fruition. 

“And you don’t think the Hood is going to have a problem with your plan?” Oliver asks.

Tommy shakes his head. “How could he possibly know what I’m about to do? I didn’t even know until an hour ago.”

And he’s right. No one will be able to stop Tommy because no one knows. Except for Oliver. 

Hanging there he remembers his father’s sacrifice, remembers the promise he made to the universe when he was lost at sea, the promise that if he ever made it out alive he would be a better man. Now he knows there’s no such thing as making it out alive. Life is a game you play to lose but he can still be a better man.

He climbs the chain and drops busting the pipe even as he nearly rips his arms from their sockets and then he fights his way out past Rene. 

Bare chested and bare foot with a chain wrapped around his chest he races across the city, to the Glades, to place where Thea died. People jump out of his way, clearly thinking he’s a junkie too and he could call out to them, tell them to call the police but he still holds out hope that he can save Tommy too. 

On the roof of the dilapidated building, Tommy’s dirty bomb is ticking away, the minutes counting down, but the Hood is there too. 

Tommy wears a ski mask and wields a gun, firing wildly at the lithe figure which dives and bobs and weaves, avoiding every shot. They are dressed in red leather with a bow and katana slung across their back, a hood obscuring their face. 

“Tommy!” Oliver yells. 

Tommy turns to look at him. His eyes widening beneath the mask. “No! Oliver get out of here!”

It only provides enough a distraction for the Hood to smash into him, knocking the gun out of his hand and sending it skittering across the roof. They grab him by the shirt and punch him over and over, the kind of blows that turn you to a bloody pulp. 

Oliver rushes for the gun, not sure what he’s doing, or who he should be helping. 

The Hood stands, breathing hard, while Tommy moans between their feet. With a gloved hand, they sweep back the hood and mask and take a breath of the cold night air. 

Oliver freezes. He knows that face.

She draws the sword from its sheath on her back, to strike the killing blow. Brown hair sweeps into her face, narrow, young, breathtakingly familiar. He reaches out a hand though he is too far away to stop her and whatever words he wants to shout are trapped in his throat.

The blade comes down.

“Thea?” A voice rasps. Tommy pulls back his mask from his mangled face and stares up at her.

The sword tip stops inches from Tommy’s throat. Their sister gazes down at him, some strong emotion cracking through. She steps back, sheaths the sword in one fluid movement and turns to run.

Oliver lurches forward. “Wait! Stop! Please!”

She pauses on the edge of the roof top and looks back, meeting his eyes. Twin red scars run down her cheekbone and she is no longer the young girl he once knew but she’s unmistakable. 

“Thea, Speedy,” he chokes out, near tears. 

She shakes her head and leaps from the rooftop into the dark. Oliver races to follow her but when he reaches the edge she’s no longer in sight.

Behind him, Tommy coughs, choking on his own blood.

“I thought you said she was dead,” Oliver says his voice cold. 

Tommy looks just as lost as him. “She was.” His eyes drift to the beeping bomb, the one seconds away from destroying 20 city blocks with a compressed dwarf star, and he curses. “Ollie, help me up. I have to stop it.”

Oliver curses too. However he feels seeing his dead sister again is nothing compared to the lives of thousands and yet he’d forgotten.

....

Later on that same rooftop in the Glades, Tommy stares down at his hands. “I think I wish she’d killed me. I deserved it.”

Oliver shakes his head. He’s done too much talking and it hadn’t helped anyone.

“I have to turn myself in.” Tommy gets to his feet unsteadily. 

“Sit down, Tommy,” Oliver grumbles. 

“No, I’m not going to sit down! Oliver, do you realize what I almost did? What I was planning? There has to be some kind of punishment for that.”

Oliver turns to face him. “For what? Nothing happened. Tomorrow that vial will turn up where it’s supposed to and no one will know. You got your face beat in for your trouble and you’ll make it right by helping me find our sister.”

Tommy looks at him sullenly. “You wouldn’t be so forgiving if I was anyone else.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t be. But I don’t care. You’re my brother.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy and Oliver jump straight from the plot of The Winter Soldier to Civil War   
> Picking up where we left off to learn the secrets behind the Hood. Also, I switch to past-tense for some reason

Neither Oliver or Tommy knew where to turn to for help finding Thea and bringing her home. Not the police. Not anyone they knew.

They considered Malcolm briefly until the Hood released stolen documents from her raid of Merlyn Industries and exposed his shady business dealings.

The news was abuzz with it and two detectives had spent the better part of the day in Malcolm’s office at the manor, their voices rising and falling. But Malcolm and Moira themselves seemed more annoyed than anything else.

Malcolm paced in the sitting room with a glass of bourbon in his hand. “They really think they know what they’re talking about. Like this is big news. If they knew what Buffet and Gates were doing.”

Moira lounged on the couch. “Honey, calm down. When this gets to court, if it gets to court, it’ll be a slap on the wrist. A fine of no more than five million dollars.”

Oliver tried to meet Tommy’s eyes across the room but his brother’s eyes were cast to the floor. Oliver’s stomach was churning uneasily. Had it always been like this? Had they always been so casual in what they could get away with? In all the years he had longed to get back home, he had never considered his family criminals.

Except then he remembered his own misspent youth. The drug charges that had disappeared. The DUI he talked his way out of. Even when he had slugged a paparazzi for getting too close it had only taken a month in “rehab”, really a trip to Barbados, to keep the public happy. Because of his wealth, everything had slipped off him like water off his expensive coat.

“Tommy,” he said sharply, rising, and gestured for him to follow him into the hallway. Tommy came reluctantly.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tommy said to the floor. His eyes were bloodshot and there were deep circles under them like he hadn’t slept at all. It was a miracle Malcolm and Moira hadn’t noticed. “My dad’s a fucking crook and I’m a genocidal maniac. You’re sorry you ever got mixed up with us.” He laughed bitterly. “You know when I was thinking of turning myself in last night, I’m amazed that I even thought I would see the inside of a cell in this town, in this country.”

“Hey,” Oliver grabbed him by the shoulders. “What you did, what you were planning to do, it was wrong. It was horrible and maybe it’s selfish to forgive you for it but it didn’t happen. You have to remember that. Still...” He glanced back to the door to the sitting room. “I can’t help feeling like it’s people like our parents who are the problem with this city, not the Glades.”

“You sound like the Hood now,” Tommy said. He gave a weak smile. “You didn’t go and actually get that liberal education while you were away, did you?” 

Oliver laughed even though it was a pretty lame joke. What he didn’t say was that while he was “away” he’d been in hell. Coming back to life, maybe his soul could be expunged. 

“Maybe, I’m just trying to turn over a new leaf.” Be a new man, be a better man. “I think the first step might be not living with my mom at 32.”

Tommy gave him a more solid smile. “Well, I do have a spare room.”

….

Oliver moved in with Tommy over his mom’s objections and maybe she had a point. He still didn’t have his head screwed on right, he doubted he ever would but he’d lost ten years of his life, he couldn’t let it stay on pause any longer. 

Tommy, of course, lived in an upscale penthouse condo with two bedrooms. The second one was mostly bare except for an exercise bike and a couple of weights. Tommy’s suitcases were in the closet along with a couple of items Oliver wouldn’t have expected. A rolled up yoga mat, a framed diploma, a box with a pink hair dryer hanging half way out of it.

Tommy cleared his throat awkwardly. “Oh, I forgot that stuff was in there.”

Oliver drew out a photo from the box. It was Tommy and Laurel Lance together. She was smiling into the camera while Tommy kissed her cheek, his arms wrapped around her, their bodies flush together. The sunset on a beach behind them, their faces glowing with joy. A shiver went through Oliver’s arm.

“We were engaged,” Tommy said. “Years ago. We were happy but she never really got over you. And she never got over losing Sara. Then her dad was killed and she was so angry. I didn’t understand, not until Thea. She moved to Central City and I haven’t seen her since.”

It was a lot of information to take in. That the woman he had loved when he was a different person had also loved Tommy. That Lance, such a steady disapproving presence in his life, was dead. That he had been killed. That Laurel had been broken by the loss just like all the rest of them.

He gritted his teeth, suddenly irrationally angry that the perfect world he had dreamed of returning to didn’t exist, had never existed. He had to put the pieces together and fix what he could.

“I’ll have to find her and tell her I’m okay. What happened to Sara. All of it.”

“I wouldn’t know where to find her,” Tommy said, his shoulders slumping.

Oliver put the picture back in the box. “Later. Right now, our priority is Thea.”

For the night, Oliver rolled out the yoga mat on the floor. Tommy quietly disapproved but with the mat and the carpeted floor it was still more comfortable than anything he had slept on for years. A compromise from the bed at the mansion that had felt like it would swallow him whole, so soft he couldn’t sleep. 

Not that his sleep now was dreamless and easy. 

In his dreams he saw Thea in Sara’s place, when Ivo had him bound to a tree and whipped him with a make-shift cat-o’-nine tails while she bled out on the ground pierced through with Oliver’s own arrows. In the real world, Sara had begged him not to blame himself, told him that she still loved him, had assured him that Slade and Shado would be coming to save his skinny ass any second. But in the dream, Sara-with-Thea’s-face screamed at him that it was all his fault, that he should have been there for her, that he was a useless brother, a disappointment to everyone who’d ever had the misfortune of loving him.

He woke in the silver light just before dawn still trying to squeeze the life out of Ivo. His heart was hammering in his chest and his hands were clenched together, white knuckled. Tears were streaming down his face.

Tommy came downstairs to find Oliver doing Tai-Chi in the center of the living room. The couches and tables had been pushed up to the walls leaving a large open area in the middle.

Oliver cracked one eye open as he pushed a curled hand forward, slow and measured, letting out a long breath. 

“Hi.”

Tommy gestured to the rest of the room. “What did you do?”

“I thought we should start practicing,” Oliver said sliding into a rest position with all the feral grace of a tiger.

Tommy’s eyebrows jumped up painfully, straining against the stitches holding his right cheek together.

“Practicing what?”

“Fighting. If we’re going to beat the Hood, you’re going to have to be a lot better.”

Tommy skulked past him into the kitchen to pour himself a mug of coffee. He opened the junk drawer beside the stove, eyes latching on the half used packet of cigarettes he’d left there nearly a year ago. 

“Any idea if cigarettes expire?” He asked Oliver between gulps of black coffee. 

Oliver shook his head so Tommy fished a cig out of the pack and lit it with a barbeque lighter from the drawer. He took a second to think about the study of contrasts they’d become as he puffed on it meditatively.

Oliver: bearded with just the suggestion of blonde fuzz on his scalp, all feral muscle, his bare chest littered with silvered scar tissue lighting up in the golden sun of morning streaming through the French doors of Tommy’s apartment. 

Tommy: bed head, a face full of bruises, his unwashed-in-weeks pajama shirt hanging loosely off his body that had grown thin in the past year- his usual exercise routine abandoned in favor of sleepless nights of pacing.

“You think we’re going to fight her?” He asked finally. “That’s your plan?”

Oliver leaned over, stretching, rolling out his shoulders and arms. “I was thinking this morning. This couldn’t have been some plan of Thea’s. That she faked her death and disappeared and then came back as the Hood. That doesn’t make sense.”

“No,” Tommy said. “Especially since she’s not even the first Hood.”

Oliver turned steely blue eyes on him. “I know. After that I realized that, I started doing research. Why didn’t you tell me my father had been suspected of being the Hood?”

Tommy nearly choked on his cigarette. He put it down, grinding the lit end into the counter top because who gave a shit.

“Because that was just tabloid rot. I mean, who claims a vigilante is a random dead guy?”

Oliver shrugged, the gesture seeming too casual for the person he was now.

“Maybe it’s too weird for anyone to make up. In my experience, people tend to come back from the dead at least once.”

Tommy didn’t even know how to respond to a statement like that. It sounded like crazy talk but well, Oliver and now Thea had come back from the dead. Why not Robert too?

He took another gulp of coffee, trying to get his brain up and running. Oliver dropped down to the hard wood floor and started doing push-ups.

Tommy mulled over what Oliver was saying, what he wasn’t saying. That it couldn’t have been Thea’s idea. That it hadn’t been her choice. His breath caught in his throat.

“So you think someone did this to her? Made her the Hood? Maybe even faked her death?” Tommy pressed his hands hard against the counter to keep them from shaking.

“I’ve seen it happen,” Oliver said to the floor. “With enough pressure, you can be turned into anything.”

“Fuck!” Tommy squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his face into his hands. “Fuck!”

Had Oliver been thinking this the whole time? The thought of Thea laying on a dirty floor in some abandoned building, her heart stuttering to a stop all alone, surrounded by low-lifes who didn’t give a shit if she lived or died. That had been Tommy’s worst nightmare come true. After his mother was shot and bled out in an alley and Oliver drowned at the bottom of the ocean, it had broken him, turned him into someone he would never forgive. But this? Thea scooped out of that coffin and turned into some dark avenger of all of the wrongs of the city against her will. It reignited all the rage he had been trying hard to bury.

“And we’re going to kill that fucker, right?” Tommy’s throat was tight with unshed tears, his body rigid.

“Yes,” Oliver said. He was standing again, watching Tommy with those pale eyes. For the first time, even with those scars, he could see the weight of the years on Oliver. The world had beaten him down far more than it ever had Tommy and where Tommy had cracked, Oliver had turned to steel.

“Okay, where do we start?”

For the next three days, Oliver beat his ass five ways to Sunday, teaching him how to fight quick and dirty. Moves taught to him by people with names like Anatoly, Yao Fei, Shado, Slade, and improbably Bruce Wayne.

“You’re kidding! That guy knew how to fight?”

Oliver faced off against him, rocking his weight back and forth. “One of the best I’ve ever seen. He wanted to change his city for the better, change the whole world. He thought he could do that by being a fighter but not a killer.”

Tommy lunged, driving for Oliver’s left side. Oliver parried him away with a hard smack to his bicep.

“Stop just trying to jump me. What if I had a knife?”

Tommy rubbed his arm. “You don’t.”

“You don’t know that. Now maintain your distance, keep me off my balance. Use my strengths against me.”

“So how did he die?” Tommy asked.

“He-”

Tommy clobbered Oliver with a punch to the temple, sending him halfway to the ground. Just as he grinned in triumph, Oliver caught him in a football tackle to the gut, twisting like a snake on top of him and getting him in a choke hold.

Oliver breathed heavily in his ear. “Ouch. He let his guard down and he let someone live who he shouldn’t have.” His grip squeezed tighter around Tommy’s throat until sparks of black appeared in his vision.

“Okay, Uncle! Uncle!” Tommy wheezed, slapping at Oliver’s forearm. “Let me go!”

Oliver uncoiled slowly as if reluctant to let his prey go. Tommy rolled onto his hands and knees, coughing. 

“So how are we going to find Thea?”

Oliver got up and shook his whole body hard. “She’s the Hood. So we just have to find the Hood’s next target?”

Tommy thought about his pack of cigarettes sitting on the kitchen counter, he wondered when Oliver would let him take a break.

“There’s so much corruption in this town it could honestly be anyone.”

“But she went after Merlyn Tech last and your father isn’t backing down. He’s making the charges go away. The Hood might think more drastic measures need to be taken.”

Tommy’s head jerked up. “They’d make her kill her own father?”

Oliver paced away and pulled out Tommy’s laptop. He’d been researching guns, the tabs were all still open. He shot Tommy a sideways glance.

“She didn’t seem to mind beating the shit out of you.”

Tommy winced and rubbed a spot on his side. “Neither do you, apparently. And you’re the only one she seemed to care about seeing.”

“I was dead. That’s got to be a shock.”

Yes, it had been, even if the old Ollie still seemed dead and buried.

“Okay,” Tommy said getting to his feet. “Let’s go again.”

….  
Tommy made excuses to stay late at Merlyn Tech, going through papers in the office he’d been given mostly for show. When he did come to “work” it was usually to sit and play tetris at the computer long enough for his father to be able to bill him as an employee. Today he’d showed up and asked an intern to bring him their financial records for the last three years. Whereas the Hood had recovered his father’s personal records from a secure external memory bank stored in a safe as well as photos of the improperly stored dwarf star material, Tommy was looking at the cooked books. Since there was no way to verify the Hood’s records were real, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network taskforce sent over from the Treasury would be looking at these and as far as Tommy could tell, they were iron tight.

No wonder the Hood was failing, his father was anything you could accuse him of expect for stupid. When he broke the law, he did it well. So Oliver was probably right that the Hood, that Thea, would escalate in her attacks. What he didn’t understand was why Oliver was so convinced it would be tonight. 

Tommy stayed hunched over the papers long after everyone else had gone home for the night. The custodian had come and gone, vacuuming and emptying out trash cans, watching Tommy while pretending not to watch him. His was the only light now on the floor. He glanced over his shoulder through the large corner window at his back to the office complex across the street. He flicked his desk lamp on and off three times. A light two floors higher on the other building, answered flickering in the same pattern.

Above him, Tommy knew his father was still in his office, working late as usual on something sketchy. The gun Oliver had bought for him, smaller and lighter than the one he had bought for himself which Oliver said would help with his accuracy, was strapped to his ankle. Tommy’s stomach turned at who Oliver was planning for him to use it against.

The light across the way flickered off and on again, G-O in Morse code. Their sign that something was happening and Tommy needed to move. He got to his feet and rushed out of the office, taking the stairs up two floors to the very top of the building where his father’s office was.

He edged through the fire door, walked slowly across the thick carpet of the reception area. There were raised voices on the other side of the door, in the office.

“We had a deal,” Malcolm said. “We explicitly had a deal.” His voice was raised, shaking in his anger.

Tommy took out his gun and pressed his back up against the wall beside the door.

“You’re the one who changed the parameters of the deal,” another man’s voice said. One that was strangely familiar to Tommy. “You’re the one who came to me begging and gave away your only bargaining chip.”

“Gave away? Bargaining chip? She’s a person! I thought we felt the same way.”

“That’s your mistake, Malcolm. You wanted to be me. You wanted to steal my life. Well, now you have it and you’ve made more of a mess of it than I ever did. Take my daughter. Take my wife. Take the death I deserved.”

“Robert!” Malcolm shouted. A chill ran down Tommy’s spine. _Robert Queen._ He was back from the dead and he was the man behind the Hood.

“The name is Ra’s Al Ghul,” Robert said. The voice Tommy remembered from parties and family picnics and summers sailing on the lake. “Kill him.” The voice turned dismissive.

Tommy went pale. There was someone else in the room and they were going to kill his dad. He grabbed the door knob with his gun hand, trying to drag his phone out of his pocket to call someone. Oliver or 911 he didn’t know. But someone.

He must have made too much noise because an arrow sprouted from the door inches from his face as if by magic. He jerked back as three more exploded through the wood of the door.

“Help! Help!” Malcolm bellowed. 

Tommy rolled away from the door as it was kicked open. A figure in red leather pounced on him and he struck out, bashing them in the face with the butt of his pistol. It was enough to push them off him and get to his feet only to feel the pressure of cold steel against his throat.

Robert Queen stood in the doorway of Malcolm Merlyn’s office, not in his habitual steel blue suit, but a black leather suit of armor from some bygone era. He was holding a curved blade to Tommy’s throat. Slowly, he reached out a gloved hand and took the gun from Tommy’s hand. The figure in red got to their feet and pushed back the hood to reveal Thea’s face. Because of course it had been her but Tommy still found it hard to reconcile. That this cold expressionless young woman was his and Oliver’s little sister or that the bleeding cut on her brow had come from him.

“Well, well, well,” Robert said. “If it isn’t Tommy Merlyn. Malcolm, it’s your son. He’s come to die with you.”

Just over Robert’s shoulder, Tommy could see his father struggling against the ropes that tied him to his own desk chair. “Robert! Leave him out of this!”

Robert circled behind Tommy and pressed the blade into the base of his skull, pushing him forward into the office. “No, I don’t think I will. You don’t know what your kid’s been up to. He stole one of your dwarf stars and was all set to blow the Glades to kingdom come. What did you call it, kid? Something overly dramatic. The Undertaking, right?”

Tommy didn’t know what to say. He felt like his throat was closing up. Where was Oliver?

Malcolm’s eyes widened. “No, what are you talking about?”

Robert jutted his chin at Thea, who followed obediently behind. “He did it for her. Or rather for the good for nothing addict she was.”

Thea didn’t even blink. Like the man who had raised her speaking that way about her meant nothing.

“I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I’m so sorry,” Tommy said finding his voice. “Thea, thank you for stopping me. I- I love you. I was just so-” He didn’t finish because Robert hit him in the back of his head with the hilt of his sword. Tommy fell to his knees crying out, Malcolm shouting in sympathy.

Robert was seething. “Shut your mouth! There is no more Thea, only my Arrow.”

Tommy looked up at him, blinking back tears. “What happened to you? What did you do to her?”

Robert bared his teeth and placed the edge of his blade against Tommy’s throat again, pressing hard enough that hot blood trickled down to his collar.

“I became who I was meant to be. I became the Demon’s Head. I shed Robert Queen like an old skin, just like how when you leave this life, your soul will peel right out of your body and meet its just deserts.” 

Which sounded painfully ominous. Tommy watched as Robert pulled back the blade and he thought bleakly, _He’s going to cut my head off._ Tommy found that no matter how much remorse he felt for his plan he wasn’t ready to die. He really, really didn’t want to die.

“No!” Someone shouted and it wasn’t Malcolm.

Halfway through his swing, Robert looked up sharply at Thea. “You dare-”

The window behind him shattered and Robert’s body jerked forward, once, twice, three times. Heat trailed across Tommy’s face but the sounds of impact in the far wall were drowned out by the thunder of gunfire. 

Robert’s sword tumbled from his hand as he stared down at his chest. Three spots of blood grew there, spilling over the torn leather and soaking the cuirass. He took a step back and another, face contorting with rage. He staggered to the broken window and looked out, catching the glint of something reflective in the window of the building across the street.

“Oh, Oliver,” he said, sounding only slightly perturbed, before falling forward out the window.

Tommy fell back onto the floor, breathing hard. He just needed to catch his breath. Just, just a minute. 

When he opened his eyes, Oliver was shaking him awake. “Tommy, are you okay?”

Tommy sat up slowly, touching the back of his head. His fingers came away slick with blood. Oliver’s hand on his shoulder tightened.

“No, I guess not.”

Tommy’s father dropped to his knees and embraced him in a tight hug. “Oh, my boy. My beautiful boy. I thought I was going to watch you die.”

Tommy laughed. Unused to such open affection from his dad. They had never been that close. Not really. Malcolm cupped his face and smiled before bringing him close for another hug. 

Tommy looked around the room. It was empty except for the three of them. “Where’s Thea?”

Oliver shook his head, looking grave. “She was gone by the time I made it over here.”

Oliver and Malcolm helped him to his feet. He hung between them unsteadily as they steered him to the door. Tommy’s eyes locked on the shattered window and the trail of blood across the carpet.

“Oliver, did- did you shoot your father?”

Oliver didn’t meet his eyes. “You heard it yourself. He wasn’t my father. Not anymore.” Tommy must have looked puzzled because Oliver smiled slightly, it looking hollow on his face. “You called me. Right before you went in there. Am I still on your speed dial?”

“So you heard everything?” Malcolm asked on Tommy’s other side. He looked uneasy.

“Only about being the Demon’s Head and that he was going to kill Tommy. I didn’t have time to think. I just…” Oliver trailed off, shaking his head.

No, Oliver hadn’t heard everything. Not about the deal Malcolm and Robert had made or how Malcolm had come to him begging and changed the rules of the agreement, whatever that meant. But Tommy had.

They got in the elevator and Malcolm pressed the button for the garage. 

“He’s not dead,” Oliver said. “My father. I don’t know how but I ran down there and he was gone. Like he’d never been there.”

“He got shot three times and fell off the fifteenth floor. He’s got to be dead,” Tommy snapped.

“For people like him, death is never permanent.”

They both looked up sharply at Malcolm but he avoided their gazes, rocking back and forth on his heels, looking like a man taking the walk to the electric chair.  
….

Later, in their apartment, Tommy sat on the couch holding an ice pack to the back of his head. Oliver was practicing Tai-Chi again. Both of them were ignoring the way Oliver’s hands were shaking.

“Well, look at the bright side,” Tommy said. “She doesn’t want me dead. Did you hear her? She was like ‘No, don’t decapitate my brother!’ It was very heart felt.”

Oliver nodded, blowing out a long breath. “I think the real reason I shot him is what he said about her. About being an addict. About not being a person anymore, just his weapon.” His jaw clenched in anger, and for a second he looked so much like Robert. “How could he say that? I thought he loved her.”

Tommy didn’t know what to say. For all that this new Oliver was a harder, stronger man, he still seemed painfully naive. Like the island had stripped away all his patience for shades of grey. And maybe that was good, he could see straight away the lines of right and wrong that Tommy had never been able to find, but it also meant he didn’t understand everyone else lost in the dark. For him it was obvious- don’t blow up innocent people, don’t be corrupt, don’t brainwash your family and turn them into killers.

Actually, when he thought about it like that, it did seem obvious. Maybe they were just too blinded by themselves to see it.

Tommy got up and put down the ice pack. Oliver looked at him skeptically as he approached slowly, arms out wide.

“I think we both need a hug. Is that okay?”

Oliver nodded stiffly and reluctantly held out his arms. But when Tommy hugged him, he held on tight for a long time. After awhile, his shoulders began to shake and Tommy could feel wetness soaking through his t-shirt where Oliver had buried his face.

“Shush, okay, buddy.” Tommy ran a hand down Oliver’s back, patting him softly. “It’s going to be okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here is another chapter to get us closer to the actual AU I want to write.  
> Because this is an AU of Earth-2 there are several differences in regards to Oliver's time on the island which I will be slowly filling in. I also tried to bring the Earth-2 from Arrow a little closer to what was already established on Flash. Which means Malcolm and Robert have essentially switched roles with the added badness of Robert no longer considering Thea his daughter after he finds out Malcolm is her biological father.   
> Let me know what you think! I'm thinking one more chapter on this fic specifically.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a kudos or a comment if you enjoyed it!  
> If you have any suggestions about where it should go from here, let me know!


End file.
